Michael Ayers’s Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism is a rich and
detailed development of two ideas. The first is that perception presents reality to
us directly in a perspicuous way. We thus acquire primary knowledge of the world:
“knowledge gained by being evidently, self-consciously, in direct cognitive contact
with the object of the knowledge.” (Ayers 2019, 63) The second idea is that concepts are
not needed in perception. In this article, the author examines Ayers’s view. Th…
Read moreMichael Ayers’s Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism is a rich and
detailed development of two ideas. The first is that perception presents reality to
us directly in a perspicuous way. We thus acquire primary knowledge of the world:
“knowledge gained by being evidently, self-consciously, in direct cognitive contact
with the object of the knowledge.” (Ayers 2019, 63) The second idea is that concepts are
not needed in perception. In this article, the author examines Ayers’s view. The author
proceeds as follows: In the first section, he identifies the target of Ayers’s attacks, conceptualism.
He then describes why many philosophers have felt this conceptualist
view to be attractive. In the next section, he discusses Ayers’s criticisms of conceptualism
in an attempt to disentangle these criticisms from the statement of his positive
view, which the author discusses in the following section. He ends by describing some
problems for Ayers’s positive position that are, so he argues, the result of his vehement
opposition to conceptualism.
